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AutoTrans: The most accurate translation? | ||
Tags: Software | Translation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Hashimi Senior Member Oman Joined 6256 days ago 362 posts - 529 votes  Speaks: Arabic (Written)* Studies: English, Japanese | Message 1 of 4 20 May 2014 at 11:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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(I hate the limit in the subject field!) Original Subject: In which language we get the most accurate translation from/to English? Today there is still no system that provides fully automatic high quality translation. However, many websites (such as GoogleTranslate and Babylon Translator) are capable of providing very useful output, sometimes indistinguishable from human translation, especially between European languages. But in what major language do we get the most accurate translation from/to English? In my opinion, it is either French or German. It is true that English has borrowed the most words from French, including the Latin ones (they share more than %60 of the vocabulary), but French is a romance language and has a very different grammar system from English. On the other side, although they share less words, Modern German and English are both Germanic languages and share a common ancestor. I think similarity in grammar and sentence structure helps in getting more accurate translation (after all, translation is not just about individual words) and gramatically, the closest language to English among the major European languages is German (Scots and Frisian are not common languages). Nevertheless, English has lost gender, adjective agreement, and grammatical cases, and does note have the V2 order of all other Germanic languages. For those who master more than two European languages: Did you make any experiments? If it is German, is the translation more accurate when we translate from it to English or vice versa? *** In Assimil series, there are only 10 English-based courses. But there are about 26 German-based courses and more than 40 in French. So I had an idea that if I want to use Assimil to learn a language not among the 10 in the English-based courses, then I can use a German-based or a French-based book, and try to understand the German or the French translations and notes using Google Translate. This is the reason why I write this post. I don't think it is a bad idea. After all, most dialogues are not complex, and they are about everyday situations (there are no lessons about "deconstruction", "super strings theory", or "Samaritan's dilemma" for example!) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Hashimi Senior Member Oman Joined 6256 days ago 362 posts - 529 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written)* Studies: English, Japanese | Message 2 of 4 29 May 2014 at 3:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well. It seems that nobody understood my question! In short, which version of Assimil is better for automatic translation to English, French-based or German-based courses? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5317 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 3 of 4 29 May 2014 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't think that nobody understood your question; it's more likely that many HTLAL users probably thought that this isn't a particularly good idea.
Most machine translation web-sites use SMT engines. I.e., the transation quality is pretty much language-independent. What matters is the number and quality of bitexts that these systems have been trained with. While you'll usually get acceptable translations for most simple sentences, I seriously doubt that an SMT engine will get all the nuances of the copious grammar and usage notes in Assimil books.
Note that the German-based courses have been adapted for German speakers and often feature hyperliteral translations that make perfect sense to German speakers, but probably not to non-native speakers and SMT engines. Have you ever had any German or French classes at all? Do you understand the gist of French or German texts? If so, pick the books whose language you're more familiar with. Otherwise you'll have to do some tests yourself. Locate both German and French books of the Assimil course(s) that you're interested in, Google translate the same lesson and pick the book whose machine translation you find more helpful. Also, check out the Ranking of Assimil courses thread. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4441 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 4 of 4 29 May 2014 at 7:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The problem with translating between languages is not only getting the right words & phrases but also
the correct context (right usage). A lot of times you can't translate from 1 to another word for word but you must read the entire sentence or paragraph to know what the writing is referring to. Normally you find that the accuracy increases with languages closely related to one another such as Danish, Norwegian & Swedish; Italian & Spanish, etc. Even with closely related languages like English & French, direct translation is not possible. "Ma maison" in French is equivalent to "my house" in English. However, when you invite someone to your house for dinner you wouldn't say "à ma maison" but you'd use "chez moi" instead for dinner "at your house". In Chinese you'd say 开灯 & 开门 but in English you don't normally say "open the light". Instead you'd say "turn on the light". You can open & close the door but you'd turn on & turn off the light. In Chinese you use 开 in both cases. Some concepts are too far off to translate such as 打风 - to be hit with a typhoon / tropical storm. You may get the term translated as "fight the wind". In countries not in the tropics storms of such nature do not exist people hardly use the word "typhoon" at all. 风 in Chinese is "wind" but in this case it is the simplified of 台风 for typhoon. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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